I forgot to include the latest injury report I have in the original post
Demarius Jacobs
G
Ques Sat - Ankle - 2/17/19
Jacobs is sidelined with an ankle injury and it is unknown if he will return against Dayton on Saturday.
KC Hankton
F
Ques Sat - Shoulder - 2/17/19
Hankton suffered a shoulder injury and it is unclear if he will return to the lineup for Saturday's contest against Dayton.
Elliott Welmer
F
out for season - Foot - 2/3/19
Welmer is sidelined with a left foot fracture and will likely miss the rest of the season.

Well, the easy way to do this is to take our winning margin in the last game of 13pts and swap out the home field advantages (9pts) and say we win by 4 . But unfortunately that's not how it works. If you are a believer , you can forget the headline...have a glass of blue kool-aid and stop reading here.
For those that are still here.....
As I started to gather data to do this thread , it seemed something was very familiar with both the names and the stats. Things haven't changed much much from the last time we played Dayton. So, since there is no reason to reinvent the wheel...I will post the SLU / Dayton thread ( pre and post game analysis) from the Feb 5th game ...with a few updates.
First, the pre game analysis from Feb 3rd..........
Dayton comes in with a B average....they have below average 3P & FT shooting . Our rebounding is better....Our D is better....On the surface this all seems promising ....but there is a huge elephant in the room.....2 P shooting ...You will note in the report card that Day is 4th In The Nation in FG%....this is a result of their 2P% being 59.6%...2nd ITN...So we have our work cut out for us.
Let's look at the report card.....
...............................SLU..............................Day.............................................SLU...................................Day
..................................................OFF......................................................................................DEF...............
PPG.........................F+.................................C+..................................................A..................................B
FG%..........................F+................................A+... 4th ITN.................................A-.................................B
3P%..........................F..................................D ....................................................A.................................C
FT%...........................F-...3rd worst ITN......D.........................................................................................
Reb............................A................................C.................................................B....................................B
No change in our grades from last game.
Top 100 ITN﻿
Stls....Goodwin ...36th
Rebs....French.......64th
Blks.....French.........84th
FG%.....Toppin.........8th (69.1%)....Cunningham....38th (62.5%)
Assts...Crutcher......28th
WWN2D2W....Day has a balanced scoring attack with 6 players who can score in double figures.....Stop their big 3....Toppin , Cunningham & Crutcher....No player should score more than 11 pts...with no more than 3 in double figures....We need to have no more than 11 TOs...Dayton doesn't force TOs...they are an F team in forcing TOs...we need to win the TO battle. We also should win the rebound war. Make the entire slash ...42/31/60
WCGW...We lose the TO battle...this could happen by unforced TOs...... We let them make uncontested bunnies and layups....You will know this is happening if you see 2P% is above 60...They start to intentionally try and gain a FT advantage....figuring we have a 36% chance of making 2 FTs while they have 60 to 70% chance of making 2s.
Bottom line....This will be a very close game... again. Good chance of OT. Unforced errors could be a killer. If we can stay away from those and make the easy shots....layups, fast breaks some bunnies we can win this game.
"Most lay-ups and 2 foot jump shots around the goal are missed by not putting the ball up high enough on the backboard."......Rick Majerus
OK ...we are back to the present...with just a few updates. ....Dayton is now a B+ team up from the last time we faced them ( B ) ...The improvement has mainly been on defense..
Here is the updated report card....
SLU is the same on offense ...sadly , we have slipped from 3rd WITN to 2nd in FT%....The good news is the defense has stayed the same.
Dayton....Offense is the same except for a slight slip in offense reb to C-...they are still 2nd ITN in 2P% ...Meanwhile, their defense is better....PPG and FG% both up to B+ and 3P% up to B-
TOP 100 ITN
Same players on both teams but different ranks since last time
Goodwin...48th...stls
French ...58th... rebs
French...75th ...blks
FG%...Toppin 11th (67.3%)...Cunningham...31st (62.8%)
Crutcher ...32nd ...assts
WWN2D2W & WCGW ...both the same as last time....
Now let's jump back in time to Feb 6 and look at the post game analysis.....
You have to keep the faith.... To those that saw this game as a blowout for the bad guys, they should have known something was up based on the spread.
This was a quality win and a great team effort..... 5 players in double figures led by Foreman who was supercharged with 18 pts...and missed a double double by 1 reb...French missed one by 2 rebs and Thatch missed one by 3 rebs.
Let's take a look at the WWN2D2W paragraph.....
"WWN2D2W....Day has a balanced scoring attack with 6 players who can score in double figures.....Stop their big 3....Toppin , Cunningham & Crutcher....No player should score more than 11 pts...with no more than 3 in double figures....We need to have no more than 11 TOs...Dayton doesn't force TOs...they are an F team in forcing TOs...we need to win the TO battle. We also should win the rebound war. Make the entire slash ...42/31/60"
"No player for Day scores more than 11 and not more than 3 in double figures"...Actual top 3 scores had 12...11...11 and there were only 3 players in double figures....The had the exact number of players in double figures and The Bills were within 1 pt of holding them to the triple 11 forecast...an outstanding effort and a definite pass....Win the TO battle....we did by 3 (worth an extra 6pts.) fantastic rate of only 9 TOs...Win the rebound war...we dominated on the boards....SLU is 3rd ITN in offensive reb with 12.4/gm...tonight we had 19 Off rebs (maybe enough to move up to 2nd ITN)...and this was the secret to the win...by sweeping the boards we got 26 pts on second chance baskets...Phenomenal. ...And finally the slash...42/31 /60...actual...42/25/ 63....I will give us a pass on this too as we were only one 3 Pt shot off from making the slash....One last thing ...FTs....while we lost the FT% contest we won overall as we had an extra 9 FTM...nearly the winning spread....btw for those that missed it, French made 2 consecutive FTs on one trip to the line.....chances of that happening were only 11%....a special moment.
Bottom line....The Bills played with confidence and energy ...They played as a team...They took the final 2 1/2 min from the Richmond game and played like that the entire game tonight. We won the game because we wanted it more than Dayton. Our shooting numbers were pretty much Billiken numbers. However, from the opening gun , we came at them and knocked them off their heels. They never did recover. We lead the entire game from post to post.
We need to bottle that and use it for the rest of the season.﻿
And again back to the present....the only update I made to the post game was to bold letter the "Bottom line " paragraph. Referring to the Bottom line paragraph............If we do it again (intensity), we can do it again (win).

I am just talking about raw data....nothing efficient about the Bills data. Similar to regular shooting stats ....where we are in the F range on FG% and 3P% but we are able to make up for some of that with offensive rebs....currently we are 6th in the nation in Off rebs....this is good news bad news....Good news is we are a great rebounding team ....bad news is we get a lot of offensive reb chances because we can't shoot. Bottom line is we are not efficient in any kind of shooting...FG%, 2P%, 3P% , FT%...but we make up for it with volume.....Like the old TV commercial.....How can our prices be so low?...How can we make a profit?...we do it with volume.

No question , there are intangibles. In a lost game , where you could have been closer , you might have been able to turn the game around. And 1 and 1s are lost opportunities. I guess , I would answer that we get more chances at 1 and 1s than most teams. The key stat in FTs for the Bills this year is ....we take and make more FTs than most teams which makes the FT % less important...not unimportant...just less important. In the end , there are some things you can't measure. But my point was that for the things we can measure, it hasn't made much of a difference overall in game outcome.

Everybody has been focusing on FT%...and rightfully so...as theses %s are near record lows. However in terms of game outcome it has probably had little effect. Let me propose an oxymoron....Bills win games on FTs....I know this is a shocker. What this means is the Bills have won more games than they have lost by FTs. Again , this doesn't quite sound right....but here is what's happening....
We take more shots (FTA) than most teams (A)....We make more shots than most teams ( FTM... B- )....Even shooting just 60% we make an average of about 1 extra FT / gm. Yes there is that loss in the final second at the FT line which was painful...but we have won more games than we have lost....ie the FTM was larger than the margin of victory or made up most of the margin of victory. An argument could be made that if we were a better shooting team , we would have less shots.
Bottom line...Our FT shooting is horrible...but has probably not hurt us much on game outcome. Much more damaging has been 2 and 3 pt shooting.Of course , you never want to miss throws that are free ....but we need help all across the slash.
From what I have seen coming next year, it looks like help is on the way

Very nice win.....
Here's how we did it....
Stopped Powell....In the original post I projected Powell at 13 pts....he scored 2 pts...great defensive job....worth 11pts
TO spread...LaS...13...SLU..11 spread is 2 ...worth 4 pts.....while this doesn't seem like a big deal...it is...In the original post I had targeted 12 TOs because 12 would most likely give us the "spread edge". By surpassing 12 TOs we not only pick up some extra pts but on the converse side it means we didn't give up 20 TOs.
We made the slash...almost...at least the important parts....projected was 42/ 31/ 61...actual 44/ 33/ 48....so we missed the FT part which cost us 3 pts. We made the rest of it which was important. It also helped (again) that we out shot them .... FTA ...27 vs 9...so the % didn't matter.
The math ....11+ 4 - 3 = 12 pts....or just about the final score spread.
Because we exceeded the upper spread number (10)...our numbers will improve....will it be enough to turn the trend up....stay tuned ....for a few days...I have to wait till Wed to work on it as Dayton (our next opponent ) doesn't play till Tues night. With the Bills now 1 game out of 4th place and playing better ... things are looking up.

The bleeding from the St, J game has stopped but we need to have a big win against LaS to get the trend line pointed up again. The variable point spread for this game is 2-10 pts. A big win would be to exceed the variable point spread on the upper end....ie win the game by more than 10 pts.
Let's take a look at the report card.....
..............................SLU...............................LaS.............................................SLU....................................LaS
..................................................OFF......................................................................................DEF...............
PPG.........................F+.................................D-....................................................A...................................D+
FG%..........................F+.................................F+... .............................................. ...B+...............................D-
3P%..........................F...................................C- ....................................................A....................................C
FT%...........................F-...5th WITN..............A..............................................................................................
Reb............................A................................﻿﻿D-.....................................................B........................................D+
Change in our grades from last game﻿﻿.﻿
UP....OFF...FG% & 3P%
Injury ﻿﻿report
2/13/19 Jacobs (ankle) ...questionable....unknown whether he can play Sat
2/15 Hankton (shoulder) .... questionable ...it is unknown if he will be able to play Sat ﻿
2/3...Welmer...Fractured left foot...out for season
2/10....Clark (lower body injury) out indefinitely....no timetable for return.
2/13...Moultrie (upper body) ...questionable....unknown if he will play Sat. ﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿
﻿
WWN2D2W...Stop ﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿Powell....hold him to 13....everyone else to single digits.... TOs need to be equal or better...12 should do it.....Dominate the boards....make the slash 42/31/61'
WCGW....We lose the reb battle....the game is close in the final 3 min ...within 3 pts. They shoot A from the FT line ...we shoot F-....not the best scenario.
Bottom line....A game we should win...the spread variable is wide 2-10 pts....if we are at the lower end of normal ...2pts, we could be in trouble....The Bills are the better team on paper , especially on defense....we need to play like we did against GW and then it will be a double digit win.

You are correct....I shouldnt have used the word auto bid....I consider it an auto bid because the NCAA has awarded the A-10 conf winner a bid every year since SLU has been a member. But it is not an auto bid. Going back to the original question ...Dav and VCU...If they both win out the rest of the conf schedule....the team that wins 2 of 3 in the A-10 tourney would probably get an at large bid

If both teams win out....Dav will get the auto bid for winning the conference. Then it will depend on the A-10 tourney results. If VCU loses to SLU in the championship game....the Rams will have a good chance at an at large bid. If VCU doesn't make it to the championship game because they only win 2, then their chances become bubble like. If they only win 1 or none , then they are out.

A nice win. We not only beat the spread but also beat the top end of the variable spread which was 12 pts. We have stopped the bleeding...again. But we are not yet back on track....we need another good game....exceeding the spread to say we are rolling again. A tip of the cap to Bess who had 26 pts...highlighted by a 4 of 6 night from the arc and 100% from theFT line. The rest of the Bills team shot the usual 60% (6-10)....adding Bess's 12-12 pushed us up to a sky high 82%.Also a tip of the cap to the trio of Isabel , Goodwin and Thatch who shot 79% from 2 pt range. (11-14)....nice to sink some short shorts.
Let's see where the 15 pt spread came from...Bess's 2 extra 3PM pushed our slash above normal plus the extra FTM gave us a 47/41/82 slash......2 extra 3s = 6pts + 5 extra FTM = 5pts +4 pts from the 2 TO spread in our favor.....6 + 5 +4 = 15pts.....And you have to remember that GW is a poor shooting 3P team and they came in with a 47% generated by 3 extra 3s. Had GW had a normal night we would have won this game by 24pts.
We didn't stop Williams but did a nice jjob on everyone else. We beat them by 7 rebs which is a little short of the 10 I was looking for but was good enough....our reb number was down a bit because....well because we made more shots which is a good thing.
Bottom line....We need to make up some ground to finish in the top 4 of the A-10. We are 2 games out with 6 to play including games with teams we are chasing....Can we do it?? Yes...if we play like last night.

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